If you were at the Detroit Tigers game on Friday and ordered pizza, well, you might want to proceed with caution.
Police have detained and charged a former Comerica Park employee who was seen spitting on a pizza while working at a stadium food stand on Friday. The man was fired Sunday, according to WWJ NewsRadio, but his damage was done over the weekend: He can clearly be seen spitting onto pizza dough before covering his saliva with sauce thanks to a viral Instagram video posted by his former coworker, Quinelle "Nell" May.
As WILX News reported Tuesday, the suspected spitter has been identified as 20-year-old Jaylon Kerley, of Detroit. The Wayne County prosecutor's office, meanwhile, said Kerley has been charged with both a felony and misdemeanor count of food law violations -- sanctions that punishable by up to four years and 90 days in jail, respectively.
May wrote in his Instagram post that he was told to leave his own shift at Comerica Park during Friday's Tigers game "because I didn't have on my Comerica Park shirt" and because he was "at the bathroom too long." That's why he decided to post the video, because "I couldn't wait until after the game to tell them an employee was spitting in customer pizzas."
He also told Detroit's WXYZ-TV that he "went to the bathroom looking around to tell people about the video but couldn't find anybody" and that once he finally did encounter supervisors, he was shut down and "threatened with prosecution if he didn't take the post down."
"Every time I tried to talk," he said, "they told me to shut up."
As for why Kerley, his coworker at the time, spat in the pizzas, May said the man was just "mad and having a bad day." Nothing like spitting in someone else's food -- right in front of a camera, no less -- to let off a little steam, right?
Detroit Sportservice, the stadium's food provider, has since released a statement about the incident, saying it "immediately closed that food stand and disposed of all the product" upon discovery of the saliva scare and that its "top priority" is food safety and "any appropriate action necessary to protect our guests."
One woman, however, has come forward with the threat of pressing charges, telling WWJ NewsRadio that May is her old neighbor and "thinks he was trying to warn her not to eat the pizza." She apparently attended the Tigers game that night and is now concerned she may have been exposed to "any number of diseases."
"It's so sickening to think about," she says. The 43-year-old (Lynette) Roberts said she ordered the meat-trio pizza and said they were cooking it up fresh. "I've literally been sick the whole time. That's the nastiest thing you can do is to spit on someone or something."
She says that May reached out to her on Facebook and told her he tried to find her after she got her food to tell her not to eat it.
